
Bringing the notebook home
I am sure as more and more workplaces provides notebooks, people will bring the notebook home. Kids are getting laptops from schools too: http://www.edutopia.org/tips-protect-laptop-computers-theft
10 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jun 2009
Numonyx previously used BJTs to do PCM. They introduce OTS here for multilayer but actually only demonstrating single layer. Having studied OTS I can say they are going out on a limb. Just to convince industry to use PCM instead of flash is difficult . Now we also have to rely on OTS instead of transistor. Two immature technologies... bad move.
For mobile users, the speed gain with power hike is not noticeable, but the battery life will be more noticeable. I don't think this is the right target but then maybe there is no other opportunity. Servers and enterprise should be all multithread by now (so running every core).
It doesn't make sense if they are out to kill off their own NOR flash and NAND flash products. It is just some marketing announcement. Maybe they did fab a 60 nm 512 Mb chip that behaves the way it is said, but they can't be running this through their flash fabs. I mean now that Spansion went bankrupt, there is so much more demand for Numonyx and Samsung's NOR flash, they'd be silly to throw it all away for phase change memory. Taiwan's memory companies would love Samsung and Numonyx to abandon their NOR for PRAM, now that Spansion is struggling.
The disk is used for capacity not speed; cache is used for speed not capacity. Many application files once they exceed MB they slow down the processor. But even the largest streamed video file will not require more than 1 GB, so I think the high-speed performance aspects of drives are overkill.
3D is definitely a sure way (and in the future maybe the only way) to increase bit capacity. But unlike standard shrinking of a single transistor layer, you are adding (stacking) many of such layers up, so the cost is being multiplied compared to the single layer.